A Jack Tale for Christmas

My mother’s mother died in the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918, when Mom was barely a year old. So she was raised primarily by her grandmother, also named Sally, and her mother’s four younger sisters.

All of the Williamson women grew up smart and well-read, except for Granny Williamson, a wiry little mountain woman who was busy, all her life, helping raise a large family in a home full of feather beds, heated by fireplaces and a coal stove. President Roosevelt’s REA didn’t reach our part of the county until 1948, so we rode out the Depression with no electricity, no running water and, of course, no plumbing.

Most of the sisters married young and moved off to Ohio or Michigan where their husbands would learn, eventually, to make cars, tires or, in Uncle Hershel’s case, give haircuts.

Mom herself moved back into my grandfather’s house nearby after he re-married in 1925. But she always remained close to Granny Williamson, even after she had begun walking to and from high school at the county seat, five miles away.

At Inez Academy, she took four years of Latin, read voraciously and became one of the school’s top students. After the last of Granny Williamson’s daughters married, Mom began helping her with household chores that required help — which included, for the purposes of this story, wallpapering.

By this time, both Granny’s age and Mom’s educational elan were showing. Each still spoke in the same mountain idiom, but at school, Professor Courtney had begun to “correct” his prize student’s grammar and pronunciation, preparing her, he said, for college and life outside the hills.

One Spring evening, Mom and Granny were papering her living room with rose-pattered strips of wallpaper. After carefully measuring and cutting each length of paper, Mom brushed each with paste and handed it up to Granny, who was standing on a stepladder near a stairway.

Granny applied the paper to the flat surface, climbed down and helped Mom move the stepladder to a floor-to-ceiling section of the wall.

Granny stretched her arms and rotated her neck. “My gints is’a achin’,” she complained.

Without looking up from her paste bucket, Mom said, “It’t not ‘GINTS,’ Granny. It’s ‘joints.’ Your JOINTS are aching.”

Granny gave Mom one of her sideways, irritated looks, but climbed the ladder again without responding.

“Here,” said Mom, handing her the next strip of dripping wallpaper. Granny raised it toward to ceiling, but the top edge came up short. “A little higher, Granny,” Mom said.

Granny, holding on to the paper with one hand and the stepladder with the other, stepped up another rung and pushed the wet paper higher. Still short. “Higher!” Mom said.

Granny tiptoed on the ladder run and then, exasperated, just let the wet strip of wallpaper slide to the floor.

“What do you think I am, Sally Mae?” she cried. “A JOINT?”

(The rose-patterned wallpaper was still there in 1956 when the empty house was destroyed. I saved a piece of it because Mom laughed every time she told the story.)

“A Jack Tale For Christmas” is pure delight. When I read these stories I feel as though I am right there, pure and simple; that I am enjoying life right smart. How I love that phrase “Right Smart.” When I typed Black Lung Hearing transcripts several years ago there were many witnesses who used the phrase. How I have always wished I could have met and spoken with these wonderful people. While I know times were difficult farther back on, I know life, our land, our principles, most things were so much better for us because we knew character, and what’s right and what’s wrong and how to act. How I would have loved to longer back during those years than the years of nowadays.